Appreciation of the music represented by a musical score is facilitated by listening to a performance of the music. The desire to listen to a score commonly arises when a score is published, and a prospective customer wishes to evaluate the music before deciding to purchase, license, or perform the work. A popular feature of certain music notation and music publishing systems is to couple a graphical representation of a score with an audio playback of the score. This is done by displaying the playback position in a graphical display of the score in synchrony with the audio playback of the performance, which assists the listener to follow the music in the score during the playback. Currently available methods only permit such synchronized playback to occur with audio renderings that are generated automatically from a digital score. Such renderings tend to sound robotic and lifeless and fail to do the score justice. There is a need to extend synchronized playback to a wider range of renderings of the score.